I have been studying Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits for a quarter of a century, as have many of those with whom I have connected on LinkedIn. The recent 30th Anniversary Edition hit my hallway floor last Saturday – actually, it hit the outside step as the delivery person stood safely distant –and I am deep within its pages again. I have already discovered a few missed nuggets. Including today.

Habit 5 – Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood – has been a familiar tenet in the corporate world, I am sure. I have read that chapter many times, and always sworn to try to apply it in testing or inquisitorial conversations. The book itself describes its use in many such instances, using examples from the perspective of the lives of individuals in their personal and working lives to illustrate how verbal conversations can be improved through application of the aforementioned Habit..

Today, I found a bit I missed and, according to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn (if my experience is anything to go by), so have a lot of other people. And possibly the reason I missed it is because this nugget was detailed not in Habit 5’s chapter, but in Habit 7’s, on renewal.

He wrote about great literature that ‘(reading in various fields) can expand our paradigms and sharpen our mental saw, particularly if we practice Habit 5 as we read, and seek first to understand.’

That was a AHA! moment. Or indeed a DUH! moment. I’d never thought about that, even if I’d exercised it. ‘Seek First to Understand what we READ’. It isn’t just a conversational model.

Realising that, and recognising its importance, led me to ask the question, “If people read the news with an enquiring rather than an assumptive mindset, would most of the rubbish on social media go away?’

Yes. People would read the allegations, check the facts, research any science or laws applicable, review the political past of the reporter/witness/commentator and eventually, perhaps, come to a less) emotional, ideological or ill-informed conclusion. And then shut the hell up.

(Of course, it might wind them up even more…..)

At the moment, we are witnessing a change in the reportage of the media. They have gone from just reporting, worked through and past analysis, and on to out-and-out commentary. Unfortunately, this is proving to be commentary without real, deep, objective or unbiased analysis.

It’s as if the middle bit is a bar to profit for the printed and commercial media, and a bar to fame and notoriety for the public-broadcaster’s employees who are all vying for a better position, or their own programme. The objective is no longer balanced reportage – it is fame and/or profit through a ‘shock-jock’ style approach..

(The last time newsreaders did something outside simple news-reading for fame, they dressed as sailors and did flick-flacks for Morecombe and Wise.)

Where have the Paul Foots and the Martin Bells and the Michael Buerks gone? They all reported injustice and societal disasters without the need for constant personal attack or self-importance. Even the famed Watergate reporter Bob Woodward now seems to be left-biased, and only appears when the right is to be attacked. (I would’ve said criticised but they’ve all gone way past that.)

But more to my point – why have we, the public, stopped putting in the effort and started to just accept what is thrown at us by the media without asking ‘Is this true, exaggerated, misunderstood or made up?’ Why have we omitted that step and then just lost our sanity and sense of calm over what we have not checked is worth that effort?

Habit 5 – Seek First To Understand is a sensible, reasoned, objective and intellectually satisfying approach to news, documentaries and other sources of information. The counter to Habit 5, Seeking First to Assume, makes an – well, you know.

Not that long ago, Republican Party Presidential hopeful Donald Trump made a speech. Following that speech the media had a field day, and thousands of people signed a petition to bar him from entering the UK on the basis of what the media had reported. The media had reported that Trump had expressed a desire to ban Muslims from entering America. That was the headline, that was the repeated mantra, that was what most people heard.

But that isn’t what he said. Or, to be more accurate, that is not ALL that he said. The press missed out the bit before that, thus deliberately (I suspect) erasing the context, and then also omitted to mention the next bit, thus deliberately ignoring the qualifier.

What he said was, and I am paraphrasing so you can ignore me if you want, was that there were people out there who hate America (Al Qaeda, ISIL being two pretty confident examples), and Americans don’t know why that is and need to find out; that SOME people who hate the USA are entering the country with malicious intent (true, or at least reasonably expected); and that the immigration system currently run by the US government was in chaos and was not fit to ensure that those who had malicious intent could be distinguished from genuine refugees/immigrants (up for debate but many commentators agree).

The bit After the reported ‘stop Muslims from entering the country’ comment was ‘until we can sort out the (bit before the comment)’. In other words, he was proposing a bar on Muslims entering the USA until their government had in place a system for better assessing who was coming for what reason – good, or bad.

That’s the press for you – as fair and unbiased as any Liverpool FC fan.

But I can’t help wondering if there’d been as much ire in 1939 when we declared war on Germany, and in 1941 when Japan attacked the USA and the Far East.

There was a quite legitimate feeling that it might be prudent to stop German and Japanese immigration and to further protect the countries by putting their nationals in camps. Now I’m not proposing the latter by any means, but given there is no reasonable certainty that ISIL AREN’T coming in as refugees, or that they are ONLY coming from one country, why not prevent terrorist atrocity by pausing immigration while figuring out how to best prevent that? How you pause it and what you do while paused is then the legitimate follow up question.

Unfortunately, as the new theatre of war is not drawn by national borders but by the abuse of an international religion, nor fought on battlefields between combatants but in the streets and against civilians, the nationality test can’t be used any more. Security can’t just be served by declaring a country ‘persona non grata’.

At least in WWII the enemy wore uniforms, invaded in bulk and (generally!) complied with the Geneva Convention.

(Blue touch paper lit, now stand well back…….)

So why this Covey quote? It suggests that the first thing you ought to do when you see or hear something from a third party is to make sure that what you are seeing/hearing is, in fact, true – completely, not partially – and not a false paradigm, whether or not well meant. To research further until the truth is fully known.

Then, if you still feel Donald is not a good person, at least that feeling is based on a full assessment and not the blind faith that vested interests want you to apply.

That way you won’t be led by the nose by someone whose only interest in you – is your uninformed support in serving their interest.

The paper and internet press obtains video of someone being shot, or someone dying in tragic circumstances. In the public interest, they elect to show the video, or part of it, on their website. At the moment it is the shooting of a 12-year old boy brandishing what looked like a pistol, a while ago it was the shooting of Michael Brown. I’ve seen it on the MH-17 flight reports, any racing crash and so on. It’s the norm.

Convention appears to be that they ensure the placement of an advertisement, one that can’t be bypassed, before the video that is the source of the story.

My quandary is this – who is the sickest? The press for trying to make commercial gain from the ‘death video’, or me for trying to watch it in the first place?

Discuss.

The truth is we are all intrigued, interested or infatuated by death and injury, provided it isn’t our own. So it is (almost) inevitable that we would watch at least part of something like that. Maybe not you, but most people. There is also a ‘safe distance’ between us and a video of events that took place thousands of miles away.

But adverts? They aren’t an essential part of such an experience, and I must question the morality and ethics of s business that insists on trying to sell me alcohol, a car or a Sky channel on the back of a tragedy.

Reading the comments sections of local and national papers I was suddenly aware that when people contribute to them they usually do so from within their Circle of Concern – or even outside of it – rather than from their Circle of Influence. Usually with an ideological perspective evident, occasionally as designed or intended by the media concerned and as shown in the way the report is leaning, and rarely with an understanding of the full facts, judging by their words.

The comments section must be designed just to wind people up!

I’ve decided that my own contributions will either amuse or educate, but will no longer merely berate. Can’t help feeling that sense of irony again……

Like this:

On a theme of ‘being lived’, another question arises. Is the media to be believed?

In the UK, there is a lot of press attention being given to one particular party at the moment, one which is pro-British and which some take to be racist in intent. I am not considering whether it is or is not. Parties, like any other organisation, are made up of people and if they all thought the same they wouldn’t need committees, so the occasional nutcase will always come out and say something stupid, or contrary to a popular ‘ism’. Again, I do not want to get into that – it’s too dangerous.

What I DO intend to get into is this – can we trust the media, and if so, to what extent?

The Press have done some wonderful things – but.

They expose corruption that we should know about, but they sensationalise misconduct that we really shouldn’t give a toss about. They keep us informed about the facts, but they also twist and exaggerate using adverbs and adjectives which are theirs, and are not necessarily designed to support the facts as much as they are intended to sell newspapers. They expose the ‘surveillance society’ and then take pictures of holidaying ‘celebs’ and focus on their cellulite, or camp outside people’s houses harassing them into submission. (All the time demanding private investigators be licenced for doing far less, but that’s my focus group and I’ll say no more!)

I am amazed by how often, at 6am in the morning, I buy a newspaper that tells me that I (aka ‘the public’) am outraged by something that I don’t know about, yet. So – is that true? Is the public ‘outraged’, or do they just want us to be so we’ll buy their rag?

The BBC is now in the habit of having one journalist report a headline, only to turn to another reporter to interview them – giving us the impression that the latter is an authority on the matter, as opposed to another journalists who has a bit more information than us but is otherwise just as uninformed as us. That air of authority warps our opinions because like it or not, it comes across as authoritative opinion – which it patently is not.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the papers reported “just the facts, ma’am”? No emotive language, no sensationalist descriptive terminology – just tell what is true and leave us to decide whether we care or not. Perhaps then we’d start living in a world where the opinion of the press was no longer relevant, or that there was at least a clear distinction between the facts and the fluff?

I say all this because whether we like it or not, if we are not properly proactive about deciding whether what we hear is accurate, or not, we will allow ourselves to be influenced by things which are INTENDED BY OTHERS to influence us, not things that SHOULD influence us.

Which will really annoy the advertisers!

(Have you noticed how, despite the media’s insistence that their channels are about entertainment and information – all the adverts seem to come on at the same time so you can’t avoid them by channel hopping? )